to do with the fucking Clergy, or any other troublemaking scum they might be afraid of – when her mother swept her away with a dozen fearful glances over her shoulder and a muttered warning for him to 'stay the hell away from her!'
Point taken, he kept himself to himself after that: got as stoned as is it physically possible to get, sat staring at a fire with all the usual bullshit thoughts of spirits and voices that he only ever got when he 'wasn't himself', and cleared off in the morning before the sun was fully up.
Two hours down the road, he passed a place called Kidder. There were three bodies strung-up on builder's scaffolding beside the turnoff; old and dried-out, almost skeletal now, dangling by their wrists on sharp cords of barbed wire. A spray-painted plaque below each one declared their crimes to the passing world.
THIEF
MUSLIM
INJUN
Each Tag had a scarlet circle sprayed below.
Rick decided against visiting Kidder.
He paused only once during the morning – another narcotic stop, to top-up the fuzziness that had insulated him from the terrors and confusions of the night – and now as he flew along the ridged spine of the grey snake road, sweeping in lazy arcs from left to right, his mind wandered in all the beautiful, empty places the Sachems would have been proud to lead him.
Endless valleys of sound.
Broken wildernesses, with great gnarled trees standing lonely on ancient barrows.
Horizon-spanning herds of buffalo (or at least, great shaggy monstrosities with horns like scimitars, which is how – never having seen one – he imagined buffalo must look), oozing across grassy plains and moaning, deep down where sound stops and feeling begins, to each other.
Ghost-dancers, capering from side to side, seething and hissing as the chalk-dust coating their dusky skin dripped away with their sweat.
They were singing a song, he could tell. All of them. The landscapes, the buffalo, the trees, the dancers. He'd never learned the language of his people – too busy playing the white kid, turning his back, ignoring the Tadodaho's patient sermons – but somehow he understood. Deep in his bones, it made a sort of sense. In his back pocket, the silver needle wrapped-up in its rags became a tuning-fork: humming a single note of crystal beauty that shivered all through him, connecting him to the world, to the sky, to the Song.
It was a hate-hymn, he understood, to drive the bad ghosts away; shrouded and tattooed, with their dusty god and their scarlet demagogue.
The sky was talking to him. The grass was tugging at his leather legs, whispering in great wind-driven susurration, and the boughs of an ancient vine – sagging over the Interstate as he drifted by on the back of the magnificent thunderbird – told him to 'watch out, boy… watch out…'
It was a heavy-ass dream-vision, and the matriarchs would have been proud – it just wasn't very good timing.
Something slapped him in the face; waking him from the foggy dreamsleep to find grasses and leaves fap- fap-fapping against his chest and head, and the trike scrambling – almost on its side – along the verge at the edge of the interstate.
'Fuck!' he yelped, waking up in a hurry. 'Fuck!'
He wound his way back into the centre of the road, negotiating more potholes, gulping for air and promising himself to stay awake – even considered getting rid of the remaining pot – when the black speck appeared in the mirror.
It got big quick.
And yeah; at first it didn't worry him. The relaxing tendrils of the smoke soothed away all his tension and he even found himself giggling, without quite knowing why, at the swiftly growing reflection. Just another biker, he figured – travelling even faster and more recklessly than him – soon to sweep-past on his way to the smoking blot on the horizon that would, eventually, become New York. Descending from the hills, the city was a spillage of brown and grey paint, washed-through with QuickSmog graffiti and chalk dust scribbles.
'Haha!' It was hard not to laugh. Not just at the other biker, oh no: at everything.
Everything was good. Everything was funny.
'Haha!'
In fact, so vast and smudge-like was the endless plain of industry and smutty air on the eastern horizon, that Rick's narcotically liberated consciousness completely forgot about the pursuing rider and went flashing off down a million new tangents, to get wrapped up in wonder at the patterns a smoking chimney made against the sky; the curious sweep of a green park amidst the urban sprawl; the flight of a bird overhead; the The roar of another Harley.
The flash of a silver jacket in his mirror.
Deep inside, at some cold rational level untouched by the cloying comfort of the drug, Rick was screaming and shouting in half-grasped terror. But outside, on the surface of the chilled-out shell containing him, he did nothing but giggle and make lion roaring sounds under his breath, trying to out-growl the approaching bike, trying inwardly to wrestle himself into some semblance of conscious control.
Swearing over and over that he'd never smoke dope again.
He watched a tiny flash-flicker in the mirror, like a speed camera shuttering open in his wake, and shouted 'Say Cheeeeeese!'
At this distance, squinting carefully into the fly-spattered mirror, he could just make out something long and cumbersome poking at odd angles off the rider of the other chopper, and a corkscrewing contrail snarling-up the air between them.
The rocket launcher.
Fuck.
'Haha!'
He would have died, but for his sluggish reactions. The idea of swerving furiously to his left gripped him by lazy degrees, so that when finally he twisted the forks of the trike's front wheel a whole second had already passed. A vicious grey blur – venting heat and smoke – squealed past him like a localised earthquake, directly beside his left ear. Right where he would've been if he'd managed to get his act together sooner and swerve.
'Whup!' He shouted, half drooling in bowel-voiding terror, half whooping with stoned elation.
The rocket dipped down a second or two ahead of Rick, then nothing but smoke and fire-flash and a bilious black-red-grey dome bulging up and out, and tentacles of soot and shrapnel curling down like the branches of a willow, and he was heading straight into the dark heart of the fireball and – and this time he swerved with a little more presence of mind, banking the trike through the blind heat and soot on the rim of a seething crater, gunning his way forwards with his eyes closed, his hair singeing, and no goddamn idea where he was going. The Schwarzenegger stunt shit suddenly looked pretty fucking ridiculous in his mind's eye.
By the time the smoke was out of his face and pouring off the bike's tyres, the other guy was almost on him; tearing an unconcerned hole in the wall of black smog and shouting something, deep and vicious, that Rick couldn't understand. In momentary glimpses at the speckled reflection he could see the rocket launcher was gone – hurled casually onto the verge the instant it was empty – and now the slumped character was crouched low over the handlebars of his reptile-green chopper like a ghost riding a lizard, free hand filled with a compact, matte-black machine gun, long silver jacket flapping in his wake.
Rick yanked the shotgun off his back and hoped he looked like he knew what he was doing. Riding one handed was all very well, and maybe he'd even be capable of firing a loaded weapon with the other, but doing both simultaneously whilst harried from directly behind by an indistinct psycho was quite another matter. He struggled for a second or two to twist and aim, almost hit an abyssal pot-hole, and swerved once again with a shriek.
The world blurred past.
The machine gun chattered somewhere over his shoulder, driving him low against the saddle, and for the second time he found himself driving blind. Miniature craters blossomed all across the tarmac below and before him, and something whined angrily as it ricocheted off some hidden part of the trike. Rick hoped it wasn't anything important, then remembered he wouldn't have known one way or the other anyway.
He was still finding it sort of tricky not to laugh.
